Universal Networking Language (UNL)

The mission of the UNL program, initiated within the United Nations and devised by the Universal Networking Digital Language (UNDL) Foundation, is to enable all people to generate information and have access to cultural knowledge in their native languages. UNL is an artificial language attempting to replicate the functions of natural language in human communication.

UNL applications will include multilingual web pages, UNL encyclopedia, etc. Currently, 15 languages have been involved and a number of institutions have started to work on their respective native languages.

In July 2004, partnership with UNDL was established and an agreement was signed in favor of BA to host the Ibrahim Shihata Arabic-UNL Center (ISAUC). The Center is funded by the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD) in honor of the memory of Dr. Ibrahim Shihata, an international jurist and expert on international development and a great promoter of Arabic culture. ISAUC plays a major role in designing and implementing the Arabic component in the development of this language and acts as an active language center for Arabic. A team conducted by UNDL was formed with members from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and qualified linguists from Egyptian universities.

The UNL project is one of the main areas of research at the BA. Currently, the (ISAUC) is working on building and designing the Arabic Dictionary in the UNL system which contains to date more than 140,000 entries and more than 80,000 concepts. Upon testing the performance of the UNL system it was shown that it outperforms other machine translation services such as Google, Babylon and Sakr.